ISSUE-41: Decentralized extensibility

Decentralized-extensibility

Decentralized extensibility

The HTML5 specification does not have a mechanism to allow decentralized parties to create their own languages, typically XML languages, and exchange them in HTML5 text/html serializations. This would allow languages such as SVG, MathML, FBML and a host of others to be included. At one point, an editors version of the HTML5 specification contained a subset and reformulation of SVG and MathML. Tim Berners-Lee described this incorporation of SVG and MathML without namespaces as horrific and the issue raiser [Dave Orchard] completely concurs with the him.

This issue limits the ability of non-HTML5 working groups to define languages as the languages must be "brought into" the HTML5 language. This dramatically increases the scope of HTML5 and decreases the ability to modularize development of orthogonal languages.

In the end, the problem could result in the text/html serialization rules becoming the standard serialization rules for XML languages, replacing XML itself. This could occur if every decentralized language has a choice between the XML serialization, the text/html serialization or both. In many cases, the language may choose the text/html serialization.

This issue was first raised in August 2007 by Sam Ruby in [1] and also raised at the recent W3C AC meeting by Tim Berners-Lee [2]

Related notes:

(Changing this to closed seems to have changed the name of who raised it; not sure what to do about this, David doesn't appear in the list for me.)

Ian Hickson, 23 May 2008, 10:05:59

I don't think we can make this design decision so blithely, and the justifications of comparing to MARQUEE, BLINK and LAYER are missing part of the point - the decentralized extensibility would be for app/content builders, not for browser vendors.

Chris Wilson, 26 Jun 2008, 17:04:27

<rubys> last week ChrisW indicated that he would prefer that that [demote from open to raised] NOT be done. We need to chat (Chris and I).